Plus Pure Fire Resident DJs Criterion, NRON, Peter Gunn, Reaganomics and Smallchange spinning the best in urban beats, from dubstep, jungle, breakcore, grime, dancehall, rap, breaks and beyond. Come down and support what we hope to be a new monthly at a sweet spot to hear music on a great system. Open bar from 9 – 10 on Sagatiba cachaca drinks.

today’s song is from Golden Afrique vol. 1, although it’s available (cheaper) at Calabash. not sure if this is an Ibrahim Sylla production, but the band from Guinea-Bissau slots nicely into the extremely beautiful category.

the informative Calabash write-up traces Mama Djombo’s arc through revolution and repression to conclude “what are left are magnetic tapes”.

a life & time unspools down to whatever medium can remember it: wet brains, hard drives, paper books, magnetic tapes, circular pieces of plastic inscribed with tiny mountains of sound that came from bodies and moved bodies somewhere, once.

bIG NeWs! — I’ll be starting a weekly radio show on WFMU this June. Expect lots of exclusive tunes & special live guests. 91.1 FM in the New York City area, with excellent internet streaming.

I’m looking for an assistant to help produce the show. I’VE GOT STRONG NEW IDEAS regarding radio’s possibilities & maybe you could help… The person must be familiar with basic audio editing and HTML-podcast-blog use, with a passion for local radio and cosmopolitan bass and (if i’m really lucky) poets/performers whose work happens in sound.

please pass the word on to any NYC-area individuals who might be down. contact: mudd.fm@gmail.com

and –

** in 2002 I did a 1-hour mix (realAudio stream) for FMU.
5 years back & it still bumps future-now.

** i’m DJing at a FREE wfmu PARTY @ Southpaw, Brooklyn this Saturday. info. Doors at 8pm, I go on at 9. and I’d recommend coming early since it’s likely to fill up, what with these bands and all…
I’ll be accompanied by Daniel Perlin on video. (we’ve performed together in Europe a bunch, this is our first thing in the US). Catch Daniel’s live audio pieces at Harvard this evening.

getting into the radiophonic spirit, here are my hands on John Peel’s show, live at Maida Vale. ah, the good ol’ days… no giant cockroaches, just foxes on the city streets outside (from Failme’s Flickr.)

it’s true: Movado’s elaborate and evil nature makes you look for classical references to describe it adequately, duppy machiavellian. and then there’s the cold stare of power achieved by naming a song ‘Amazing Grace’ and plastering your long haunting void melodies on top of the church notes.

2 contiguous fragments of an excerpt of a very recent cumbia mix caught streaming here. Includes a handful of Celso Piña tracks.

Excerpt 2 contains Piña’s song from the film Babel, a track that would be brilliant if Manu Chao hadnt used a similar formula to sell millions of records, imbedded in a movie about a complex and interconnected world where personal struggles are shot through by larger machinations of power and bursts of dangerous unpredictability, a multi-tiered society where the powerless connect with the privileged in increasingly violent encounters, realism, and the characters in this land with the most emotional depth are North American movie stars with perfect teeth like everybody who has ever had braces, only brighter.

Babel is about Brad Pitt trying to date Cate Blanchett on the secret while his girlfriend buys babies in Africa and a Japanese girl keeps pulling up her skirt. It’s hard to keep a secret if you are famous. The movie-version Moroccan kids with the gun didn’t have a real gun, they were Pakistani kids with a plastic replica in the sun-baked Spanish landscape where drought has forced entire provinces to abandon farming and work offering ‘Moroccan/American Southwest’ film location services at sub-Saharan wage scales, on the low-end of which stand these kids’ “parents”, the adults who control the child actors, the ones who get paid for the kids’ work.

Things were better before Andalusian tourism collapsed, taking the hospitality sector with it. Elsewhere, a Mexican woman loses children that aren’t hers. The Japanese girl stands naked because she has thrown her clothes off the roof.

The Pakistani child actors who dont get anything aren’t on the wage scale. Division by zero f*cks arithmetic. And in the real-life version that the movie is based on, these kids had a digital camera they were trying to “shoot” runaway lovers Pitt and Blanchett with, to get photographs to sell to the highest paying gossip magazine. The fees can be astronomical. Apparently they just upload them via Blackberry once the money arrives in their online offshore bank account. It’s considered ‘paper-free business’ and the carbon rebates for companies and incorporated individuals are rumored to be indulgent.

one of the many reasons i like Cam’ron is b/c his in&out uptown niggerati avant-garde pink-thug wordplay Harlem cryptohomo flimflamboyant whipcrack poetry lifestyle partakes of a lineage that began with Langston Hughes.

The thing about Killa Cam dotting his ‘i’s with lil hearts and generally acting like a middle-school girl is that it is somehow completely believable, and this, coupled with the fact that somebody put A LOT of time into it, just pushes OhWord’s work over the edge into nextlevelness & we thank the internets, whose magic functioning Cam explains here.